A fundamental difference between novels and short stories

As noted in previous posts, there is a fundamental difference between the world view of a novel and the world view of a short story: Novels, because they tend to be about an entire family or society and they encompass a greater range of character and feeling, tend to be about inclusion; the protagonists may be social misfits but they tend to want to fit in and belong, and the course of a novel is often about accommodating the protagonist to his or her society. Short stories, because they encompass only a moment of feeling or action, tend to be about misfits, outcasts, outsiders, aliens, oddballs, and weirdos - characters who cannot fit into society and never will and don't want to. This is of course a vast generalization, and you can cite numerous exceptions, but it's a useful polarity, and it helps us understand Tolstoy. I'm reading the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of "Ivan Ilyich and other stories," and it strikes me that Tolstoy was essentially unsuited to the story, his best characters are too societal, too conventional for the form - they want to fit in, and they feel like they've strayed from one of his great novels. The protagonist in The Devil is a good example - a good man, trying to maintain his grandfather's estate and his new marriage, tormented by his sexual yearning for a peasant woman. It's a perfectly good story, but doesn't have the knife edge of the greatest Russian stories (Chekhov). Ivan Ilyich is a much greater story because of the way illness and death throws Ivan into isolation and alienation; Kreutzer Sonata is Tolstoy's attempt to create a Dostoyevskeyan madman and he can't do it - the character is noncredible and unlikable, in contrast to Dostoyevsky's endlessly fascinating Underground Man.